Before the World Trade Center collapsed in smoke and rubble, rescue workers struggled heroically to empty the towers but were hampered by communications failures, fractured command structures, and poorly conceived evacuation plans, the independent Sept. 11 commission said yesterday.
Those lapses - which may have added to the death toll of police and firefighters as well as tower occupants - to some extent still plague the city's emergency-response system, panel members contended.
"I think the command and control of the public services in this city is a scandal," Republican commissioner John Lehman said. "It is not worthy of the Boy Scouts."
The commission's findings, released as the panel opened a two-day hearing, focused in large part on the steps that emergency-management agencies in New York took before the attacks to protect tower occupants in case of catastrophe.
The immediate focus was Sept. 11, 2001, but panel members' main concern was the possibility that terrorists might strike once more, and that New York might be unprepared.
"The chances are it is going to get attacked again," said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democratic commissioner.
Top New York fire and police officials who were on duty Sept. 11 disputed the allegation of a command failure, and responded sharply yesterday to Lehman's scathing commentary.
"There is nothing scandalous about the public-safety agencies in this city," testified Thomas Von Essen, the former city fire commissioner. "You make it sound as like everything was wrong with Sept. 11. I think it is outrageous."
The performance of police and firefighters in the aftermath of the attacks is a highly sensitive subject; 403 public-safety workers died at the trade center. Those who perished had remained on the scene to help evacuate remaining tower occupants, many of them elderly or disabled, from the twin 110-story towers.
Those police and firefighters are widely viewed as heroes of Sept. 11. But the commission also found that the city's emergency-response system was hurt by malfunctioning radios, rivalries between police and firefighters, and the lack of a full-fledged evacuation plan.
Families' applause
In at least one instance, a police team tried to check in with fire commanders in the North Tower before attempting a rescue operation but was rebuffed, the commission implied, because of the rivalry.
In a staff statement released before the hearing, the commission said that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - which operated the towers until several weeks before the attacks, when they were leased to a real estate company - had never organized a complete fire drill in either building.
Dozens of Sept. 11 family members applauded at moments yesterday when panel members criticized the emergency response.
The commission showed film clips of city fire officials taken at the trade center Sept. 11 by a French documentary crew (the completed documentary was televised in 2002). The interviews with fire commanders - and interviews later taped with several building occupants and also shown yesterday - depicted a scene of chaos, one where reliable information was in short supply.
Lacking information
"One of the most critical things in a major operation like this is to have information," said Joseph Pfeifer, now deputy assistant chief of the New York fire department, who lost his firefighter brother, Kevin, in the attack. "We didn't have a lot of information coming in. As a matter of fact, what you saw on TV, we didn't have that information."
Emergency-management officials had concluded that rooftop evacuations by helicopter would have been impossible because of smoke and severe wind gusts created by the heat of the fires. Moreover, building managers had kept the doors to the towers' roofs locked to deter suicides, and hang gliders and other thrill seekers.
But they never told the towers' workers, many of whom, realizing they were trapped, tried to get to the roof.
The commission reserved particularly sharp criticism for the city's 911 system. It said that 911 operators were ill-informed about the attacks and had no clear idea where the jets had struck the buildings. Because of this, they could not in many instances provide helpful information to trade center occupants who, after the first jet hit, frantically called 911. The information was important; for a time in the South Tower, one stairwell remained open, connecting floors above the impact site with the ground.
"Among the most serious problems we have found is that people who called 911 got bad information or no information at all," Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick said.
The panel said that local agencies had improved security and safety procedures in the towers after the Feb. 26, 1993, truck-bomb attack that killed six people and injured 1,000.
But one of those changes, though appropriate to dealing with the earlier attack, got in the way on Sept. 11: Fire officials generally discouraged mass evacuations unless occupants were in imminent danger, because of confusion that had developed as people exited the towers in 1993.
After American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, building managers in the South Tower advised occupants, some of whom had begun to evacuate, to return to their offices because they were thought to be safe.
That order was reversed as United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03. But evacuations in both buildings were hindered by, among other things, the towers' design. Their stairways did not descend directly to the ground, but rather ended abruptly in hallways far above ground level, forcing evacuees to grope through the dark in search of the next leg down.
Underlying much of the testimony, and implied in the staff report, was the view that it might not be possible to make colossal buildings such as World Trade Center towers entirely safe.
In addition, the report suggested that it probably was not possible to have saved the lives of hundreds of people trapped in the top floors above the points of impact. Helicopter rescues in the North Tower likely would have been impossible because, in the words of one rescue official, the roof was an "antennae farm."
While the South Tower had a small helicopter landing pad, the heat and smoke coming off the building created atmospheric updrafts that would have made it difficult to control the aircraft.
The rescues in many instances rested on individual initiative.
"There was no standard operating procedure," said Sue Keane, a Port Authority police officer, who took part in the rescue efforts. "We just did whatever we had to do to guide people to the stairwell."
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